


Solve For X

by rho_nin



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Deliberate Miscommunication, Dramatic Irony, Enhancements, Foster Care, Gen, Human Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, James MacGyver is not Angus MacGyver's Father, Lies, Mutant Powers, Mystery, POV Alternating, Past Child Abuse, Spies & Secret Agents, Trans Character, aka:, and a lot of people who just have a very complicated relationship with gender, because i can watch the whole show now, but focuses most heavily on the MacGyver characters don't worry, but more than usual, the timeline is no longer as messed up as it could be, this is essentially a crossover with a spy setting I wrote, trans themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2020-10-04 09:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20468624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rho_nin/pseuds/rho_nin
Summary: Any spy worth their salt is a good liar.Mac, it turns out, might just be a little better (and more prolific) than almost anyone else.  As his childhood closes in, the dangers raise with the stakes.





	1. The Stranger at Lake Como

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac's bedside is apparently a _ very _ interesting place to be.

"I'm sorry Mr. Dalton, but there's only one visitor allowed at a time," said the nurse with a heavy Italian accent. She didn't sound very sorry, from where Jack was standing; she seemed rather stern and a little exasperated.

"What are you talking about?" he snapped. "I just called my boss, and she's not here yet."

Jack had just returned from getting coffee, which he thought he could afford to do. Mac was still drugged to the gills after having the bullet removed from his chest and wasn't going to wake up any time soon, Thornton was still on a plane to get to the hospital, and Nikki... 

Well, she wasn't going to be visiting.

"Someone is there, sir. You'll have to wait your turn."

Then the nurse left —_ left!_ — without giving Jack a chance to argue the point. As soon as she turned the corner into a different hall, he peered into Mac's hospital room, trying to get a glimpse of who the _hell_ had come to visit Mac in freaking Italy. Who even knew he was here, for crying out loud? It was a covert op with a cover story for its cover story. Was it someone else at DXS? Even if it was, the question remained:

_Who?_

He couldn't get a good look through the wire glass. He could see Mac easily, could see the heart monitor and the rest of the little graphs he'd only learned to read through osmosis, but he couldn't see who was sitting with him.

It didn't look like they were sitting in shadow, it was just hard to look at them directly. His gaze kept sliding off.

He could, however, look at the person's hand. He wouldn't have been able to describe it to anyone, but the movement was unmistakable. It only took a few cycles to realize that the finger was tapping the words "wake up" in Morse Code. 

Mac did not comply, and Jack lay across two of the chairs in the hall to wait for Thornton.

* * *

"Jack?"

He jerked awake.

"Patti! Hey!" He struggled into an upright position, twisting to get the knots out of his back. Attempting to sleep as he had was never a good idea, and it had been a long day already.

"This is unusual for you," she said. It sounded as crisp as usual, but for the slight tremor in her voice. "I would've expected you to be playing guard dog at MacGyver's bedside, though I suppose the door to his room isn't that far off." For only a moment, she paused. "And it's _Director Thornton."_

"Well, I would've done, but someone was in there."

Patti's face scrunched a little, looking concerned. "Someone was in Mac's hospital room, unsupervised, after we _just_ got him to a hospital after being _shot_ on a supposedly secret operation?"

Jack couldn't find a way around admitting that. "Yeah, basically."

Sure, it wasn't a good look, but as near as he could tell, the visitor had worried for Mac. They certainly hadn't been hurting him or Jack would've woken up. Not to mention that DXS had managed to make the hospital a jerry-rigged stronghold in only a few hours; if the guards patrolling the hospital in plain clothes thought Mac's visitor was a danger to him to anyone else, they wouldn't have let them in the door.

He didn't have a chance to say any of that, though, because Patti was already past him and in the room.

Jack rushed after her, but Mac was no different than when he'd last left him. He wasn't any worse and didn't look any better. He was also still unconscious.

"Thank god," Patti said, exhaling harshly.

Then one of the nurses passed the room and barked, "One person at a time!" and Thornton excused herself, leaving Jack to slump into a new uncomfortable chair.

"I'm really sorry about this, kid," he muttered. Even if Mac was awake, he probably wouldn't have heard it. "Sorry about you getting shot in the first place, about—" He broke off, covering his face with his hands. Mac had known about Nikki's death when he fell in the river; he'd told Jack so before passing out. But he hadn't had a lot of time to really let it sink in. When he woke up... well, there wouldn't be any hiding it. Nikki was dead. They hadn't found her body. Her funeral would be for an empty coffin, with no closure for her family or for Mac until they caught up to the weaselly man who'd killed her.

This _sucked._

He dropped his gaze to the floor, where a screw was.

And where a price tag was tied to it, with the price a grand total of $1.50 with a vertical line drawn through the zero in ballpoint pen. He plucked it up and flipped the tag over, where '146' was written with the same pen.

"What the hell..."

A panicked gasp broke him from his thoughts, and he looked up to see Mac thrashing in his sheets. His hand went, to Jack's surprise, to his hair.

"Mac, Mac!" Before he knew he was moving, Jack was holding Mac down. "It's okay, it's okay. Just breathe, hoss."

The only answer was a surprisingly strong right hook.

"Dude! I was _just_ checked for a concussion, I don't need that whole thing again." He shifted to put most of his weight on Mac's right arm, which was thankfully his uninjured side.

The poor kid looked around for a second, clearly not a damn clue where he was, before his eyes settled on Jack and he lay back. He jabbed a finger towards Jack, snarling, "Do _not_ do that. Jack, I—" He sighed and dropped his arm. "Ow."

"No shit, bud, you got shot in the chest." Jack rubbed at his jaw. "How can you punch me that hard after that?"

"You scared—" a wheeze, "—the crap out of me."

Jack nodded. That was obvious. It wasn't very obvious _why_, though; they'd been in plenty of situations like this before. Mac had been shot before, of course, and he'd woken up in strange places, too. He never stayed asleep for long and, true, he wasn't usually on as many pain meds as he was right now, but this was nothing new.

"Sorry 'bout that. Anything I can do now?"

Mac grumbled for a moment. "Not really. How bad's the bleeding?"

He saw the deflection for what it was. "Not so bad, all in all. The recovery period's gonna be a bitch, according to the doc, but the biggest worry's infection. Fallin' in a river and crawlin' around in dirt didn't help you any."

"And passing out while lying on top of the hole in my chest didn't help either." Mac laughed breathlessly, gesturing towards his chest. "Gotta love that."

And wasn't that weird? Mac had been on his _back_ when he'd fainted next to Jack by the truck. Unless one of them had misremembered it, of course. Jack would put money on him; he was the one with a concussion, after all. In the long run, it wouldn't mean much, probably, so Jack held out the screw, eager to get some answers. "I think someone left this for you."

With his good arm, Mac took the screw, turning it back and forth. His face had shuttered into an unreadable expression, which Jack hadn't seen much before. Mostly, he saw it when the matter of James MacGyver came up, or when people asked questions about a particularly odd skill.

"Huh," was all his partner said.

"You know who it was?"

Mac looked up at that. "Who what was?"

"Someone came to visit you, kiddo. And I couldn't get a good look at them."

Mac returned to studying the screw. "Not a clue."

For some reason, Jack couldn't quite bring himself to believe him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm hoping to churn out a chapter every few days, but none of them are written in advance and I don't really have an update schedule.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	2. Hatstands and Protocol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For all his virtues, Mac seems to have forgotten what being partners means.

After waking up to Jack pinning him down, Mac had refused any more sedatives in his system. He'd decreased the morphine drip to allow himself to think, but he still couldn't let go of his dream.

That probably made sense. He didn't dream a lot in the first place; a dream like _that_ was going to stick with him for a while.

He hadn't seen much of Thornton recently, though he knew she was there. Jack had been in and out almost constantly, checking up on him and making sure he was doing alright.

They hadn't properly talked since he'd woken up.

He'd been turning the screw over in his hands since Jack had handed it to him; a screw with a price was a weird calling card, so he should be able to figure out who'd left it with him.

The numbers, of course, gave it away, but he wasn't going to tell anyone that.

Not even Jack.

The curious question was where the screw had come from. It didn't match any of the machinery in his immediate vicinity, and he couldn't really move a lot to look around. He'd also been told at least a dozen times that if he tried to leave the room, there would be hell to pay, so that was out of the question at the moment.

How was he going to keep going, now? How was he going to keep working? With Nikki dead... 

The team was a mess, or going to be. He was a mess already, even if he didn't want to express it. He wasn't focusing properly when the sound of twin gunshots echoed through his mind every time he closed his eyes. A dream of drowning and gasping as his head was shoved underwater. A _memory_ of being surrounded by his blood only yards away from the corpse of his girlfriend and the unconscious body of his best friend.

If he hadn't the experience he did, his hands would be shaking.

On that note, as soon as he was back in the States, he really needed to start seeing a therapist.

He tried to roll onto his side, but he pulled on an IV and what felt like fifty other wires, while the pain in his chest only throbbed more. Groaning, he flopped backwards and started crying.

Crying on his back meant the tears slid down the sides of his face into his ears. It felt like ear drops, which Mac had never liked. It reminded him too much of growing up. Still, he couldn't turn onto his side, so the only mitigating action was wiping the tears away before they got to his ears.

Moving his left arm hurt like hell, so he made do with only the right.

Damn Lake Como and damn the biological weapon that had brought them all there. Above all else, damn the men who had shot Nikki and left Mac stuck in a hospital, _useless._

He heard the door open and Thornton walked in, her heels clacking on the linoleum. Mac gave his eyes another wipe and moved to sit up before deciding that was a terrible idea.

"How're you doing? Feeling alright?"

Her mouth was set in a hard, unhappy line.

He didn't know how to answer. On one hand, _no_, he wasn't. On the other, he really didn't want to explain everything to his boss.

"I think I'm going to need some time off."

Thornton nodded. "Of course. That's only to be expected."

"How long until we'll go back to the U.S.? I mean this is in the best possible way for the doctors, but I'm, uh," he dropped his gaze to his hands, "ready to never see Italy ever again for as long as I live."

"That's _also_ to be expected." Thornton shifted her weight onto the other leg. "And I expect the doctors will give you the all-clear in a day or so. You were lucky; the bullet missed almost anything vital, so they expect you'll be fully mobile in a few months. Of course, DXS will make sure to take care of any physical therapy you may need."

"Thanks."

"Before you get back home, though, we'll need to go over your cover story." Mac tried with dubious success to hide a groan. "I know now isn't a nice time to think about it, but you need to get your story straight. After getting hit like we did, we can't afford to be sloppy."

The terrible thing was that she was _right;_ if they slipped up and tipped someone else off about DXS, the men who'd killed Nikki might find out and the rest of DXS might come crashing down. And if _that_ happened, they were at an even worse place than square one. They would have no resources, no back-up, and no information or connections to hunt down the people who'd stolen the biologic.

"I need to call Bozer," Mac said, instead of admitting all that.

"Not until after you're debriefed." Thornton moved to the other side of his bed and took a seat. "Here are the facts as we will present them: Nikki died in a car crash while you two were on a business trip. You were in the car but had only nominal injuries."

"Only nominal? Jack said I was close to _bleeding out._"

Thornton didn't seem to appreciate the distinction. "Do you want him interrogating you on this?"

Mac shook his head 'no.'

"Then this is your cover, and you'll be sticking to it. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She stood, giving him a nod. "I'm glad you're alright, MacGyver. Take care from here on out."

"Yes, ma'am."

Then the door shut with a click, and Mac was left in a room with two windows, a miscellany of medical monitors, and an air vent. And absolutely nothing else to do. He sighed, and started reciting the periodic table to himself when a piece of paper dropped on his chest.

He unfolded it, his grip tightening as he read the note.

** _NMVTAHCMLHIUEDHDZADBVV -- where we hung our hats_**

He bent backwards to look up at the wall, where the air vent was. He hadn't been able to see it before, but from this angle, the lack of the bottom right screw was obvious. Smiling, Mac settled into a more comfortable position.

It seemed old habits died hard. 

* * *

Jack paced back and forth in the hospital lobby, rubbing at his leather wrist cuff. His boots squeaked on the linoleum as he turned for another pass. He pinched at the bridge of his nose.

Why wouldn't Mac talk to him about his suspicions? He seemed to know about the screw, so what was the big deal — was he protecting someone? Did he think Jack would be mad about what he had to say? _What was going on?_

Damn it all, they were supposed to trust each other.

Or maybe, after getting shot and obviously being blown on a covert op, he was a little wary. That was understandable. Jack could get behind it.

Maybe they could all afford to be a little more cautious.

Jack sunk into a chair. It was still exactly as uncomfortable as it had been the other night.

Maybe Mac being totally forthcoming was a little too much to be expected, given the circumstances. Jack had met plenty of people who closed up after trauma, and being shot right after watching your girlfriend's murder had to qualify as trauma. For crying out loud, Mac had been close to bleeding out before Thornton got the ambulance to them. Plenty of people would hide away for the rest of their lives after something like that; it wasn't going to be easy to recover from. And for all that Mac was good at adaptation, everyone had limits. If nothing else, he needed time.

Best of all, time was something Jack could give him. Thornton be damned, Mac wouldn't go back to work until he was ready; maybe not even then, for a little bit. The kid was hardy, sure, but not indestructible.

He really needed to go talk to him.

Jack plodded through the halls, trying to think of what to say. It wasn't normally so hard; anything that came to mind generally ended up coming out of his mouth. But they'd lost the biologic and Nikki had been shot and now they were stuck being a two-man team.

He wasn't quite sure what to say, now.

At the door to Mac's room, he paused. Inside, Mac was squinting at a piece of paper that looked like it had been torn out of a college-ruled notebook. He twisted it back and forth, tapped at his mouth with his index finger, and in general looked like he was overthinking something. It was probably good for him; if he didn't have _something_ to do, Mac would probably go mad.

Jack knocked and slipped into the room.

"Feeling better?"

Mac practically dropped the piece of paper, looking like a deer in headlights. "Oh, uh, much. I wish the doctors would let me move around more."

If Mac hadn't just been shot, Jack might've said something along the lines of 'I won't tell if you won't', but that wouldn't do now. There was a damn good reason Mac was staying in bed, and Jack wasn't about to undermine it. "I hear you, hoss. Just wait it out a bit." He considered sitting in the chair, but decided against it. His poor tailbone could only take so much. "Whatcha got there?"

After a moment of hesitation, Mac held it up so Jack could see. "It's a cipher, but I don't know what it says yet."

The first half was definitely in code, but the second just looked like a crossword clue. Jack had never been very good at the crossword, though. "How about that second bit? 'Where we hung our hats'? Do you know what that means?"

Mac shook his head. "It's some idiom, I think, but I don't know what it actually refers to."

Jack had already pulled out his phone and started tapping on it. Only a few taps in Google redirected him to an 'idiom dictionary,' where it defined the phrase pretty clearly. "Looks like it's talking about living somewhere. This website says 'taking up residence,' but I'm not sure how useful that'd be to you."

The kid just shrugged. He didn't seem to be in too much pain when he did it, but sometimes it could be hard to tell. "Can you plug this into a Caesar Cipher decoder? I think there's at least a hundred and it doesn't really matter which one."

Jack did, after laboriously typing out the string of letters, but after clicking through every possible shift, it was clear it was still gibberish.

"Nada."

"Phooey."

"'Phooey'?" Jack repeated. "Never heard you say that before."

Mac shrugged again, a lazy smile on his face. "Old habits, I guess. Cursing was kind of frowned upon with my dad, so..."

Ah. The long-dreaded subject of James MacGyver. Well, the kid could say weird, psuedo-curses all day if it made him feel better, so Jack busied himself by googling lists of other ciphers. "I pulled up other codes but I don't know what most of these are, actually. Frankly, I tended to hand ciphers off to the analysts at the CIA, so I might not, ya know, be your best bet on this."

"It's fine. Having another set of eyes helps."

Jack felt that in this case, it helped just about not at all, but he didn't say so.

"Could the second half be a, uh," he re-read the passage on the cipher website, "an encryption key?"

Grinning, Mac sat up as far as he could. "That would cross out at least half a dozen codes, I bet. Can you make a list of any codes that use a word as the encryption key?"

That Jack could. After begging a sheaf of paper off the secretary using mangled Italian, they started drawing up possibilities. Mac was animated and Jack was elated; his partner was still trusting him, still letting him in on things.

It left the question of who'd sent him the note and who was lurking in the hospital to visit MacGyver, but at least they'd be united when they finally started solving _that_ problem.

Things would be fine.

* * *

Things were not fine.

Though, in Mac's not-very-humble opinion, he was good at covering things up when he needed to, Jack had already seen the code when he walked in. Hiding it would look suspicious, and he didn't need suspicion right now. He needed about a thousand different ways to not solve a cipher.

Thank goodness for the internet.

If Mac was right about the other circumstances surrounding the note, then he had a pretty good idea of what the whole 'where we hung our hats' thing was. But telling Jack would invite about seven billion questions he tried not to answer on principle, and that just wouldn't fly.

No matter what the plain text turned out to be, the encryption key would just invite disaster.

151 should've known better.

So should he.

_He'd_ asked for Jack's help on the code. _He'd_ naively thought he'd escaped the whole mess. _He_ was the one on a knife's edge between letting the cat out of the bag and keeping himself and everyone else safe.

151 was probably stuck on clean-up if they'd shown up in the hospital, but 151 wasn't responsible for his screw-ups; he was.

Jack seemed to be making a point of avoiding the subject of Mac's odd visitor, probably because he didn't like the implications of a stranger knowing the ins and outs of DXS's operations. That was perfectly alright; delaying that conversation for as long as possible sounded like a great plan.

Hopefully, they could delay it long enough not to need it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I _did_ get another chapter out in just (two? has it been two?) days! Huzzah!
> 
> As you can see, this is a hell of a lot longer than my first chapter. This is probably more what should be expected from here on out in terms of length.
> 
> Gold star if you can decipher the code (and if you can't, don't worry; you should be able to soon)!
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	3. Closest Park At Eight Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No matter what universe Mac ends up in, his childhood is going to be terrible.

The transition to being back at home went smoothly. Bozer fussed, which was to be expected, and physical therapy was a pain in the ass, which was equally expected. Really, nothing seemed out of place.

Mac had solved the cipher as soon as he had the chance to be alone.

If he ever met up with them again, 151 would be seriously disappointed in how long it had taken him. The better part of two hours to find the right cipher and work through it all when only a little over a decade ago, he'd been able to come up with the plain text almost in his sleep. But he hadn't been in much of position to need ciphers recently; other people took care of codes and handled the more subtle communiques. By the time any of them reached Mac, all mystery had been stripped from them.

Until the note.

It was an encouraging message, overall. He'd set it as an 8 a.m. notification on his phone, a reminder to keep his head down and stay alive. As long as he wasn't drawing any unnecessary attention, all would be well.

After he decoded the cipher, though, Mac didn't have anything to do. Without work, the days both slowed to a crawl and sped by in an indistinguishable blur. He wasn't really sure what he was doing, except that sometimes he would realize he was half-way through disassembling the oven, forcing him to race to put it back together.

Nikki's family had emailed him about the funeral, but he hadn't responded yet.

He wasn't sure what he'd say at it. Really, he hoped he could avoid giving a eulogy, which would sound oddly empty after the DXS secrecy review went through it with thick black marker. How could he explain everything he did — everything that he and Nikki were to each other — without the death-defying bonding moments? With those removed, it was a bizarre relationship trajectory.

Maybe it was a bizarre trajectory no matter what.

A week or so into what was still (loosely, since the only enforcement was the powerful glare of Jack Dalton) house arrest, Mac started counting the days using the arrival of the mail. Sunday tripped him up, but it generally worked.

(Technically, it wasn't house arrest in the slightest, but Jack seemed to have a sixth sense for when he'd left the house and would tail him wherever he went, ostensibly to make sure he didn't pass out again. Mac suspected a camera somewhere in his front lawn.)

When the mail arrived a month since getting back home, Mac didn't think anything of it. He scooped the pile up and sat at the kitchen island to sort through it.

Bill... bill... _Atlantic_... letter from Bozer's parents... bill... MIT asking for money...

At the bottom was a manila envelope without a postage stamp. That wasn't suspicious at all.

He slit it open with his Swiss Army Knife and dumped the contents out on the kitchen counter.

A CD in a paper case and a postcard from Neuschwanstein Castle.

He flipped the postcard over first. It was a mix of cipher and plain text, all swirling together. On the address bar was just the letter 'X' followed by ten numbers. Not a designation then; probably a phone number. Above that was the plain text "Have a lovely summer break," with a shaky smiley face. In the upper left corner was the alternative alphabet they'd made together years ago; it was easy to crack with frequency analysis, but a good proof of identity all the same.

A few other codes dotted the card, but that alternative alphabet meant something urgent.

He was a little rusty, but it didn't take nearly as long as the Veginere Cipher to crack. After all, this was the code of secret meetings, of notes scrawled with chalk in the bathroom, of warnings in the middle of the night. More than anything, it was the code of escape. It was the code which had probably saved Mac's life. It was hard to forget.

"Closest park at eight tmrw," it read.

Eight? He'd go morning and night, just to be sure, but chances were it was in the morning. Out of habit, if nothing else.

He shoved the postcard in his pocket and took the CD into the living room.

Bozer had kept an old karaoke machine, and while the microphone produced some horrendous sounds with pretty terrible audio quality, it could still play CDs just fine. Mac popped the CD in the dish and plugged in a pair of earbuds.

It wasn't speech. It was music — the kind of music children made on pianos, plunking out note after note. They didn't have a regular length or pitch and Mac had never heard the tune before... but if 151 was sending him music, it would mean something. Neither one of them had ever learned an instrument in the time they knew each other, and for all Mac knew, 151 was still stuck.

Were they calling for help?

If 151 had ever asked anyone for help, Mac hadn't heard about it. They certainly wouldn't do it without a lot of caution and encryption; it just wasn't how they'd been trained. He rewinded the CD and focused again.

It only took a few tries to recognize that it was Morse Code. He scribbled the message out on the manila envelope.

_Glad you're okay. Don't get shot again if you can help it. Want to talk in the AM. Will be on bench with hat. Stay safe._

It was a long as hell Morse message.

But hey, if Mac was going to see 151 again after... god, had it been 14 years already? Well, he would pretty willingly decode a Morse Code message of any length.

Then the piano stopped and he heard a raspy voice over the earbuds.

"I thought you might want a care package, so..."

* * *

"Hey, buddy, how was today?" Jack called, pushing his way through the door with a bag of groceries. When there was no immediate response, he poked around the house until he reached the living room.

Mac was sitting on the floor, earbuds plugged into Bozer's karaoke machine, with both hands covering his face. Alarmed, Jack set the grocery bag on the floor and tapped Mac on the shoulder. His hands dropped, and Jack could see the tear tracks that had wound down his cheeks.

"Just breathe," Jack said, a little bit to himself as well. "It'll be okay, just breathe."

Mac took his advice and scrubbed at his face.

"Man, what happened? Were you listening to Landslide or something?" He sat next to Mac on the floor, unsure of what else to do. "You want to talk about it?"

Mac cleared his throat and occupied his hands with taking a disc out of the player. "Not particularly."

"I can't help if I don't know what's wrong, Mac."

"This isn't something you can help with," he said. "Seriously, it's just..."

He trailed off, and Jack tried to imagine what he was thinking of saying. 'It's not your problem'? That would be a load of bullshit. 'I can handle it'? Sure, if Mac wanted to define handling it as in tears on the floor of the living room.

"I think I just need to take a nap," Mac settled on.

"Yeah, bud, get your Zs, it's okay." He patted Mac's back as he got up. "I'll still be here when you get up."

Mac seemed to stumble a little as he left the room, taking the upsetting CD with him. Jack sighed and leaned against the couch. Mac was shutting him out, _again._ And for some CD? Something was up, for sure, and there wasn't much that could make MacGyver cry. Whatever he'd been listening to had messed him up in a big way — Mac was easy to read and hard to rattle like that. When had he gotten it? Was it a reminder of older miseries or a more recent tragedy? No matter how Jack teased him, Mac wasn't one to cry from listening to music. There had to be more to it, but it didn't seem like Mac was going to tell him.

He checked his watch: 4:52. Bozer would be home soon and Jack would miss his window.

Mac couldn't have gotten to sleep yet, so maybe Jack could catch him before he was out for the evening. He walked down the hall to Mac's room and knocked, waiting for an answer.

"Yeah, Jack?" Mac replied as he opened the door.

"You just seem real upset, kid." Jack put his hands up. "You don't want to go into specifics or anything? That's fine. I can just be a shoulder to cry on; it's okay. But it's not all that often I see you like this and even an old idiot like me knows that whatever this is has only made the aftermath of Nikki worse. So..."

Mac nodded, like he knew this was coming. "Yep." He stood aside in the doorway, letting Jack in. He closed it after Jack and slumped into his bed. The disc and a postcard were both piled on his nightstand.

"So what's wrong?"

"Nothing," Mac said, then, at Jack's incredulous face, he reiterated, _"Nothing!_ Really. It's not _bad._ It's just that it's news. About people I never expected to hear from again. I missed 'em."

"Who was that, then?"

Mac cleared his throat and looked at the postcard. "Childhood friend."

After getting a slightly better look at the card, Jack asked, "A childhood friend who lives in Germany?"

"No, they just travel."

"And they couldn't pick up a cellphone to get in touch, instead of sending you a CD?" He mimed typing on a computer. "Maybe send you a message over Facebook or somethin'?"

Mac laughed at that. "They couldn't find my number and I have no idea if they even use Facebook, but apparently my address is listed somewhere. So they sent me that instead. It's been so long since I heard them. And their voice was so high then. They should be..." he leaned back, his calculating face on, "24 now. Yeah, they're about three, four months younger than me, so..."

"When's their birthday?"

A weird look crossed Mac's face, not dissimilar to when he talked about his own birthday. "I — I can't remember. Fuck —"

"Hey, it's okay, it's okay."

They were both perfectly aware it wasn't, but the lie was all he could come up with as comfort. Something had definitely happened to this 'childhood friend' and he wasn't getting any vibes that it was good.

Instead of voicing that, though, he pulled Mac into his side. "It'll be okay."

* * *

As sweet as Jack was being, he wasn't solving any problems. He just wasn't in any position to; the things he didn't know could fill a book, and Mac wanted to keep it that way. The fewer people knew about the mess that was 151 and 146 and all the rest, the better.

Which was why Mac was out of the house through the window by five a.m., before anyone else was up. It strained his chest, but it was a hell of a lot better than Jack trying to tag along on a family reunion. He walked to the to a 24-hour coffee shop near the park 151 had specified, ordered apple cider, and waited.

The clock struck 7:45, and Mac was on the move. There were a lot of benches, after all.

But not that many people hanging out in the park at eight a.m. with a faded green baseball cap. He made a beeline for the hat-wearing person, who stood as he got nearer.

They were taller, of course, than they had been when Mac had seen them last, and they had a thin scar under their ear that Mac had never seen before. But it was 151, without a doubt. They closed the distance between them as fast as they could, embracing Mac when they met.

"You hug now?" he asked.

"I've learned a lot, you know."

"And are you still..." He waved a hand vaguely behind 151's back. "There?"

"Not for nine years, now." They hugged him tighter. They'd been waiting fourteen years to see him again; no wonder they didn't want to let go. "And you can call me Kell."

A name. Mac smiled. "Mac."

"It's nice to meet you."

They let go, mirroring Mac's smile.

"Believe me," he said, "the pleasure is all mine."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This moved way faster than I thought it would! I'm used to writing slow-burn monstrosities where characters don't even fucking interact for like 16 chapters, but I really wanted to introduce Kell as fast as possible because I love them. Also, dragging out the plot gets a little dull after a while, so have a Kell and (a few) more answers early!
> 
> The reason I said 'summer break' is that I'm from Chicago so L.A. weather bewilders and terrifies me.
> 
> Also, I don't have a beta and write most of this late at night, so I apologize for any stupid mistakes.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	4. You Don't Know What You Don't Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one is good at giving a straight answer, and Jack conspires.

Kell and Mac started making a circuit around the park, talking quietly. Kell's caution was almost palpable; they scanned the area around the two of them constantly, and would pause for a moment when someone started coming near them. They were on the look-out, just as they'd both been trained to be, and it made Mac's heart hurt.

"You said on the disc that you've been doing okay," Mac began, after one of Kell's scans. "By okay, you mean...?"

"The Directive hasn't contacted me, and I haven't contacted them, for one."

Involuntarily, Mac let out a sigh of relief. Kell turned an accusing eye on him.

"What, did you think I was here to lead you back? 14 years of silence from the Directive, and you really think they're suddenly going all out for an operative who went MIA?" Kell shook their head minutely; more full reactions had been ground down into nonexistence, Mac knew. "As far as the files are aware, you were lost on a retrieval in Florida. 'Recovery not worth agency expenditure' is what the file's marked."

Mac stopped dead. "You read my file?"

"I read the copy I was _allowed_ to read. There's a couple sections that are blacked out, and I know for a fact that some are straight-up altered. The W-class file has a different telling of you than the X-class one." Kell shrugged. "What can I say? I've always been curious."

Mac couldn't help bristling a little. Files were as private as anyone in the Directive could get, and 151—_Kell_ had just opened his up for fun? "When?"

They shifted, scanning the park again, before looking back to Mac. "Just before I got out. I'd recently been transferred back to Montana from one of the other bases, where I'd been in a training-intensive for about three years. Operations were scarce there, since they wanted to make sure I really had my shit together. So getting back to the Ranch meant I was up for higher priority missions and..." They swallowed and started walking. Even though Kell was about a foot shorter than he was, Mac had to walk fast to keep up. "Well, you know what that means. More potential damage, more potential casualties, more certain danger. But also more autonomy; after getting back, the Ws didn't watch me as much."

Mac had only about a hundred questions, but he let it slide. "So why get back in touch now?"

"Dude, you got shot."

Mac didn't say that he'd been shot a couple times already, or list all the times he'd almost been blown up in the past few years. How the hell Kell knew he'd been shot when not even Bozer was privy to that, Mac didn't like to think about. It probably meant his old training partner hadn't given up espionage, just like he hadn't, and that could complicate things.

"Thanks, I guess. You could've been a little less cryptic, though."

Kell's mouth twitched. At the Ranch, they might've been scolded for even that, Mac remembered suddenly. But then they brushed their longer-than-requirement black hair out of their face, and it was easy to see that things had changed.

"I wanted you to know it was me."

A quick response was on the tip of his tongue, but his phone rang. Kell didn't move, except to gesture he should take it. Their face had settled into stone.

"MacGyver," he said, picking up.

"Mac!" shrieked Jack over the phone. "You can't do that to me, bud, leaving before I'm up! Christ, you're gonna give me a heart attack!"

"Sorry, Jack," he said, mostly for Kell's benefit. They looked like they could do with more information. "I know, I should've left a note before I left, but I appreciate not having a tail as I try to go grocery shopping."

There was some inarticulate grumbling from the other end of the line. "Alright, I get you. I'm just worried, alright?"

"Gotcha."

"And the whole mess from last night didn't help, you get me? Please be careful, we've had a crappy enough month as it is." Mac winced. Jack didn't usually talk like this — at least, he didn't get as open as this. He must have been really freaked out. After a brief pause, Jack asked, "So you're grocery shopping?"

"Uh, no. That was just an example." He glanced at Kell, who was looking away but no doubt listening attentively. "I'm just walking around. Thought I could do with a little exercise."

"Okay," Jack said, and Mac could imagine him nodding and coming to peace with the situation. "Alright. Just check in every once in a while, okay? I'll see you later."

"Will do. See ya." He hung up the phone and slipped it back in his pocket. He reached out towards Kell, who was staring fixedly at a sculpture across the park. "You sure you're okay?"

They nodded. "Just cautious."

"Sure."

"Want to get an actual breakfast?" they offered, no doubt eager to distance themselves from the discussion.

Mac nodded his assent, and the two of them swiveled to head in a new direction. The conversation slipped into more idle chatter as the Kell led them into town in search of some half-decent waffles and a boat-load of syrup.

* * *

Jack set Mac and Bozer's landline back in the cradle and slumped into his chair.

Mac was right about the privacy thing. In the past month or so, Jack had become an shameless helicopter... partner. He always had to know what was going on, how Mac was doing, if he was healthy, safe, or any number of things. But that was _justified._ Mac had just been shot and still had weekly physical therapy. Mac's girlfriend had been shot too, with a funeral in a week. And Mac didn't have anyone to talk to about this except for Jack, the DXS therapists, and _maybe _Thornton, if she was in a good mood.

So letting Mac do his own thing (and maybe disconnecting the camera Jack had hidden in a tree to keep an eye on the door) was probably in order. After all, Jack couldn't spend the rest of his life chasing after an impulsive genius with a death wish. (He could, actually. It was already his job.)

But Mac just... skedaddling in the middle of the night with no note or phone call?

It was on-brand, sure, but not the sort of on brand Jack wanted to see. If they were on a mission, the lack of communication could get someone killed. Even at home in Los Angeles, Jack wasn't fond of the idea of Mac bumbling around the city at two in the morning. As soon as Mac was out of his line of sight, all Jack could see was potential threats.

He still had to remind himself that Mac was an adult, actually, and didn't need a chaperone to take a walk.

And yet.

And yet Mac had nearly gotten himself blown up, shot, poisoned, strangled, knocked out, captured, drowned, suffocated, or impaled so many times that Jack couldn't really trust the guy to keep himself alive. And yet, if Mac had any instincts that tended toward self-preservation, Jack had yet to see them. And yet, the snippets of background that Jack had pieced together painted such a sad picture that he wished one of the lab techs would invent _something_ that let him go back in time and punch Mac's good-for-nothing dad in the face. It wasn't going to happen, but a man could dream.

What was he supposed to do, though? Mac could jerryrig his way out of anything, including protective measures. Not that Jack would dream of actually trying to lock the kid up; there were limits, after all. But when it came right down to it, if Mac didn't want company, he wouldn't have it, and there wasn't a damned thing Jack could do about that.

Maybe space would do the trick.

If he took a few steps back (or a whole mile back, really) and let Mac open up at his own pace, maybe things would go back to normal.

As normal as they could, with Nikki dead.

Maybe 'normal' was a long shot.

* * *

The 151 that Mac had known growing up didn't take long to show, once their conversation turned to lighter subjects. Their humor manifested in dry sentences that were barely out of place if Mac wasn't looking for them, hearkening back to nights of endless study in the dark and kitchen duty swapped for other chores via poker, as taught by some of the older kids. They palmed a few mints from the breakfast cafe as they paid for the meal, explaining it with an off-hand comment about company policy. And just as Mac had taken up paperclip art to replace fidgeting, the newly-christened Kell seemed to have a knack for origami.

"Really, crash pathology is a fascinating field," they explained as they creased a blue sheet of paper. "Did you know that an English lord did tests with actual guinea pigs to see how depressurization affected them? No change is the technical way of describing the results, but in the notes they were described as 'slightly startled.' Then the same lord made a catapult to test water impact wounds by slinging the same hapless rodents at a pond. Lovely man."

Mac smiled, remembering similar digressions about the history of code-breaking. "I've been doing mostly chemistry work, not so much pathology."

"Right, of course," Kell said, nodding. They paused for a moment. "Do you enjoy it? Are you allowed to say what you're working on?"

It was a peculiar dance they had going on; they'd both acknowledged certain facts that precluded their cover stories (or so Mac supposed; Kell hadn't actually explained what they told friends as opposed to colleagues) but also refused to admit that they were both spies, past and present, with no indication of change.

"Well, think tanks are funny like that," he demurred. "But yes, I'm enjoying myself. Still, a lot can go wrong in a lab, you know. I don't suppose that's true for you?"

Would it really be too much to ask that, even within the intelligence community, Kell had settled into doing something sane?

"You know how it is," replied Kell, completely straight-faced. "Translating is a world of international chaos."

Of course it was.

"And... any family? Friends?" Kell gave him a look, which was mild compared to Jack's looks of incredulity but conveyed the sentiment nicely. "What? After nine years, you've got to have _some_."

"I have, actually. I just didn't expect you to ask." They held up a hand and tapped their fingers in turn. "Parents, both nonbinary, and two siblings, also nonbinary. I've been told it's hereditary."

Mac gaped for a moment. "How?"

"Technically, it's all a coincidence, but—"

"No_, _not that. You have _parents. _ All I managed was a grandfather, of sorts, and a dog. How'd you get a full nuclear family in nine years?" Even if he didn't mean it, the words came out jealous. He had five years of freedom on Kell, but they'd achieved normalcy in one of the places he'd totally failed.

To his surprise, Kell looked a tad uncomfortable.

"We're all adopted. And for... similar reasons. Personally, parent one caught me listening in on their lectures at a college about a month or two after I got out." They ran their finger along a crease with a bit more force than was necessary. "Things led to things, as things tend to do, and then I had a room of my own."

That could be explored at a later date, Mac decided. Family was a touchy subject for both of them, and there was no reason to play near the third rail.

His phone started buzzing again, with Jack as the caller i.d. Mac held it up to explain. "Sorry."

"No worries. Call your friend." They glanced at their wrist. "I should get going, anyway. It may be a weekend, but I've got errands to run." They stood, wiping their hands one more time. "You've got my cell number, so keep me posted if you can. I'll stop leaving cryptic notes if you want."

"Uh, no, actually, that's fine." Mac shrugged. "It's nostalgic."

Nostalgic for one of the worst parts of his life, but nostalgic nonetheless. And Kell excelled at codes, just as he excelled at making things. Codes meant things were A-OK; there was time to decipher and puzzle things out. Plain text meant desperation.

"Keep your head above water," he said, reciting first Kell's message.

"And stay out of Italy," they replied with a slight smile. The door jingled behind them as they left.

He answered the phone. "Hello?"

* * *

"Hello?"

Jack swallowed a sigh of relief. "Hey Mac, just checking in."

"I haven't walked into traffic."

"Good to hear. Look, I just talked to Patti and I wanted to let you know I'm going back to work tomorrow."

There was a beat of silence on the other end.

"Oh."

"Patti said to take as much time as you need, though. I just won't be hovering as much." _As much as I should be, _said Jack's head, but he ignored it. "There's no rush and there's no projects Patti wants us to do, so it's just day-to-day shit, but I wanted to keep you in the loop."

"Thanks. I'll..." Mac trailed off. "I'll find something to occupy my time."

"If you take his oven apart, Bozer'll kill you."

A snort. "Preaching to the choir, Jack."

"Hey, the choir could learn a few lessons about healthy caution. I'm just saying you gotta do something other than rebuilding the house."

"I was thinking running."

Oh, that never meant anything good. "All day long?"

Something on Mac's end rustled and a siren blared in the distance. "Nah, but I've got to do _something _to keep in shape. I'll be fine with Bozer keeping an eye on me. He's been making meals like he thinks I'm gonna keel over; a Bozer-led intervention will keep me upright. And it's better than flipping through channels all day."

He had to concede that.

"Call me if you need _anything,_ okay? Anything at all. My phone's always on."

"Sure."

It wasn't quite the answer Jack was looking for, but it would have to do.

They exchanged a few more comments about dinner for the next week and plans, but Jack's mind was on something else entirely: the chances of getting Mac into therapy before he made a habit of going off the grid, or vanished entirely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had pneumonia and I forgot about this story for a bit, sorry!
> 
> I feel meh about the ending, since I think it fell a little flat, but I guess that could reflect how Mac and Jack aren't actually talking that much? I don't know. Mac really should be in therapy, though. For so many reasons.
> 
> Also, I have no idea what happens past season 1, since I haven't bought the other seasons and for various reasons am unable to watch them free. This will be more obvious later. (Most of my knowledge of who James MacGyver is comes from reading other fics so...)
> 
> Thanks for reading! I appreciate comments and kudos!


	5. The New Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's episode 1, baby.

Mac and Kell saw each other periodically over the next two months. The use of codes had diminished with the exception of a few crosswords in the Times that Mac was certain Kell had tampered with and a streetlight that flashed a steady stream of nonsense in Morse code between the hours of seven PM and five AM.

They were easing back into the whole sharing secrets thing, but that was fine.

Mac wished he could talk about Nikki more than anything else, though. The Directive had done a downright shoddy job of producing any emotionally mature operatives (Mac being no exception), so the topic just seemed unwise. Kell probably wouldn't have any idea how to respond, and then it'd be awkward and uncomfortable and the topic would shift to something else that was just as much a minefield.

So he exercised, instead.

The routine was as advertised within a week. Once, Mac had woken up to tying his shoes and realized he was getting ready to go on a run without being awake for it. A quick survey of the kitchen indicated that he'd already eaten breakfast.

But he'd been right: it was better than sitting in front of the TV all day. He kept his mind off the other circumstances (a funeral he'd gone to but tried not to look like he was at, a murderer still on the loose with a deadly biological weapon, and a drifting relationship with Jack after hiding behind a continuous work-out for the past two months) and he was getting stronger by the day. His shoulder didn't hurt so much, though he had a new scar which Kell would probably get excited about.

They'd taken his scars after his operations, he remembered. The process was hard to forget.

Getting out of the shower to find Patricia Thornton in his living room was almost a welcome change of pace. _(Almost.) _ She'd been hands-off, as Mac had asked her to be three months ago, but this distance was... pleasant. It was more privacy than a file in a locked drawer ever afforded him.

What she wanted wouldn't be, but Mac could still be civil.

"Thornton."

She smiled as she got up from the couch. "Mac." Her hair was down. It was new. "You look good. How's the—?"

"Coming along." He held back a wince at his tone. "You?"

"Think about her everyday." Of all things, Thornton was biting her lip. She wasn't often so expressive—it reminded him of Kell and their non-reactions—but this was different. Something in her expression wasn't just sad.

But Thornton wouldn't turn up just to mourn Nikki. "What are you doing here?"

"Vacation's over. It's time to get to work."

With the aid of an iPad and a brutal video courtesy of the Naargard research facility, Thornton laid out the situation. 

Of course it was the damn biologic. It was bull_shit _that he had to go after this, his personal specter. Nikki had died for this damn weapon. He'd see the man who killed her and maybe the bastard would end up in jail, or maybe he'd just get away again. But the whole thing was a mess—a lasting mess, with lasting consequences and enduring visions of things that would be nightmares if he had them when he was asleep.

"We need you."

He met her gaze. Thornton knew she had him—helping others always sealed the deal and it was no secret to DXS. 

* * *

The fact remained that they didn't have an analyst. Their team was broken. Not beyond repair, since no operation team was ever beyond repair (after all, one of the first lessons he'd ever learned about operatives was that they were disposable).

If Jack recommended this Riley Davis, then she was good enough for Mac.

_(She could never be Nikki.)_

Of course, there was the small issue that she was in a Supermax prison and supposed to remain there for at least five more years, but that didn't mean much to DXS and even less to Mac. The file of redactions was a problem too, but to DXS that was practically a sterling resume. He gave one last look to Thornton, and he and Jack pushed open the door to the interview room.

"Ugh," was the first thing Davis said. "It's _you._"

Jack pressed his lips into an unhappy line. Mac rolled his eyes. Of course Jack would manage to find the one hacker he had a hostile history with and recommend _her._

"Ms. Davis, if you could please ignore Jack for now." He waved Jack to the side of the room and sat down to explain the situation of Nikki's laptop. He dodged any questions of the issue of the biologic; if Davis helped them, she'd find out soon enough. If not, she'd be a liability. "So can you help us?"

But instead of answering, Davis looked to Jack. "Is there anything you want to say to me?"

This weird tension was going to get a lot of people killed.

"You help us out, I'll put in a good word with the judge," Jack offered. His gaze shifted to the side and Mac wanted to bang his head against the table.

"That's not what I'm talking about."

Mac watched tiredly as Jack bungled his way through negotiations of restitution for _whatever_ this was. Davis clearly wasn't having it, and Mac didn't blame her. "Look, whatever's going on between you two, can we put it aside for now? We have a serious problem and—" he paused for split second before deciding on "Riley, we could use your help."

And, of course, Jack decided to spill the beans on their occupation as intelligence agents, which anyone smart enough to hack Nikki's computer would be able to deduce.

"So you're DXS?"

Maybe she'd never be Nikki, but if she could just be Riley Davis, maybe everything would work out.

* * *

By the time Mac was watching the truck with a massive bomb in the back blow up on the highway, he could pretty comfortably say that things had fallen apart. After three months mourning Nikki, it turned out that she was A) alive and B) working with the organization that had shot her in the first place. No matter what her answer on the plane had been, Mac couldn't help but feel that everything she'd done or said was a ploy, up to and including everything in their relationship. He was supposed to be better than that; he wasn't supposed to be duped. Dupe-able. He was trained to be better than that.

Jack helped him up and into a truck, keeping up a steady stream of distracting babble.

About halfway back home, Mac couldn't keep his questions to himself any longer. "Do you think she ever really... Do you think she was lying about _everything?"_

Jack passed him a sympathetic look. "Iunno. Which feels better?"

Mac shrugged and turned towards the window.

"All I know is that she did a good job of foollin' us all. The folks at DXS are supposed to be able to see through anything; hell, _I'm _supposed to be able to. CIA and all that. But I never would've guessed it." Jack didn't look at him now; Mac understood that this was an agonizingly indirect way of saying _'yes, your girlfriend is certainly capable of it' _ and didn't want to look at Jack either. "All I can say is hang in there, buddy."

Mac shrugged again, looking out of the corner of his eye. "Keep my head above water."

Jack actually smiled at that, nodding earnestly. "Yeah, buddy. Keep your head above water, exactly. See," he punched Mac lightly in the shoulder, "that's what I'm talking about!"

"You sound like Kell," escaped his mouth before he could he think of what he was saying.

He watched Jack's grip tighten on the steering wheel. "Kell, huh?"

"My friend I told you about. Their name is Kell." He couldn't think of a good excuse for why he'd never mentioned them before, so he didn't try to explain at all. "They sent me a message... a couple. They're trying very hard to be encouraging."

Jack looked around the street, groaned, and pulled over. "I can't have this talk while I'm driving, Mac, this is insane!" He turned the car off, sighed, and mimed beating his head against the steering wheel. "What do they know that they're 'trying very hard to be encouraging'? You know how dangerous our job is; _please_ tell me you didn't spill the entire pantry of beans to someone you just talked to again for the first time in a decade!"

Mac held up his hands in surrender. "I didn't say anything about DXS, promise. They looked me up, I guess, found Nikki's obituary and..." he gestured helplessly with one of his hands, "it was out of my hands from there."

Jack really did let his head fall against the steering wheel then. "Come to any dangerous conclusions, did they?"

Frankly, there was no way to know what conclusions Kell had come to. But since he was already lying his ass off anyway (with good cause! At least one major international intelligence agency was already out for Kell's blood—Mac's too, if he was being honest with himself—adding DXS to the list wasn't a good idea), Mac grinned in a way he hadn't since he was 10 years old and said, "They're a translator. They've never been dangerous, and they're hardly likely to ever guess the spy thing. When we were younger, all they wanted to be was an acrobat. I..." He laughed, a little hysterical. "I don't know why I'm telling you that. It doesn't answer your question."

"Probably 'cause you missed 'em, hoss."

Mac didn't say that he'd tried to forget Kell, who for so long had been only 151, who he'd been told to think of only as a colleague, another cog in an unknowable machine. He didn't admit to how the difference between them in age—surely only a few months—had always left him feeling like what he knew now was an older brother. He didn't say _"I was 146 even after I escaped" _or _"I knew how to make bombs before I knew how to disarm them" _or _"I made Angus MacGyver up."_ He could only stare back and wonder when his eyes had become so wet.

* * *

Mac shut the door to his room and pulled out his phone. He dialed without looking at the screen; his vision had only gotten blurrier in private.

There was the click of a phone being pulled off the cradle at the other end. "Hello?"

"Hi," Mac replied. "Kell, I just... I—"

"You sound like crap," Kell interrupted. "And not the kind of crap I'd expect after your sort of work. What happened? Are you okay?"

He slumped down on his bed. "I don't—I'm not hurt."

"Physically speaking."

"Yeah."

"You _sound_ hurt. You sound upset. Do you want to talk about it?"

He did. He wanted Kell to listen and understand the situation. He wanted to return to the days when they snuck moments of confidence in the upper level of the horse barn or near the environmental controls. But he didn't want to do that over a phone.

"Tell you what," said Kell, "we have way more chairs at my house than we basically ever need. We cook so much food that we can live on the leftovers for a week. Come over for dinner sometime. Anytime. Or we'll go back to the stereotypical meetings in parks with ponds. It's your call, 'cause it's your deal. Anything I can help with, just ask."

Maybe Kell would get it better than Jack could. Their childhood (if it could be called that) had marred them both with lessons they couldn't leave behind. Kell knew how it felt to have betrayal baked into life and still find the time to be surprised and upset about it.

"What's your address?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yooooooo school has been kicking my butt with the homework load and I kept rewriting this chapter so it took a really long time to finish, but I'm happy(ish) with it now. So here it goes!
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you like it! Please kudos/or comment if you did :)


	6. Dinner and a Movie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac has a little R&R while Jack and Riley do some digging.

Mac found himself in front of a small house a mile or two outside of the downtown area. Nothing marked it as unusual as far as he could tell at first glance; there were no cameras fixed on the street, no blacked-out windows or strange codes lining the walls. Just a box for mail by the door and an untidy lawn.

He checked the address he'd scribbled down, just to check he hadn't made a wrong turn, but this was it.

Shoving the scrap of paper back in his pocket, he climbed the concrete stairs and hesitated for a moment before steeling himself and ringing the doorbell.

The sound was immediately met with the sound of shouting from inside the house, the clatter of pans against a hard surface, and the pounding of feet against a hardwood floor. The cacophony only settled down when the front door was yanked open by Kell, who was just in the middle of screaming back at someone, "I _told you_ that it'd burn and look what happened!" They turned back to Mac, who was still a little stunned, and said, "Come in, come in! We were just making dinner. Or," they added, raising their voice, _"some of us _were making dinner, _Jess!"_

"As soon as you can fix Scooter without causing a power outage, I _might _deign to respond to that," called a rough voice from further inside the house.

Kell rolled their eyes exaggeratedly _(had they ever been so expressive before?) _and stood aside to let Mac inside. "Nine years of Jess, and we still haven't grown into adults around each other."

Probably because Jess, whoever they were, was one of the first people Kell had been allowed to be a child around. The Directive had corralled them into roles of responsibility and solemnity, carrying out their jobs with a sort of stubborn, grim unwillingness to let down the adults guiding them. Mac and Kell had been squashed into roles that they shouldn't have taken on and were still breaking out of, but Kell seemed to have found people to be themself with, whoever that turned out to be.

Inside the house, Mac couldn't help but be surprised at how much it felt like a _home._ Like his own house he shared with Bozer (and with Jack, when they weren't pretending), it wasn't just a building with the bare minimum to live with. It had knick-knacks and photos and post-its stuck to the walls. It was a living reminder of who its inhabitants were — this was more than just a temporary safehouse.

"Jess and I were cooking," Kell explained, guiding Mac through taking his shoes off and towards the kitchen, "but it's been going badly. So Rhys has gone out to get something else to eat."

"I thought you said that you cooked," teased Mac.

"Oh, I do," Kell assured him. "But Jess doesn't."

Someone — Mac presumed it was Jess — poked their head out from the kitchen, brandishing a spatula. "I'll have you know I'm doing very well for attempting a task I'm not programmed for."

"I'll give you points for the fact nothing's on fire," Kell conceded. "But I'm also taking credit for that."

The friendly back-and-forth of siblings, much like how he spoke with Bozer and Jack (and now Riley, though they hadn't talked much) was almost baffling with he saw it done by Kell, of all people. Kell, who just a few weeks ago had been treating a literal walk in the park like a high-risk operation somewhere they could be disavowed.

"Sure, X, and you did what exactly?"

Mac looked to Kell. "X?"

"Oh. Yeah. See, everyone in this house — barring Rhys — is a Keller anyway, so going by 'Kell' gets confusing. It's like if I found myself around your, er — the family you made up — and called you MacGyver." Kell shrugged. "And I only started going by Kell kind of recently anyway, as a pseudonym for college. So most people at work and at home call me X. I wasn't too creative straight out of the gauntlet."

"You barely spoke," Jess interjected, scoffing. "You stared at empty static all day and wouldn't let us teach you how to use the TV remote."

Kell — X? — glared at their sibling and led Mac into a small living room just off the dining room.

"I can't believe that this is where you've ended up," Mac said, before realizing that wasn't exactly what he meant. "I just — I mean that this isn't what I expected from you."

"What _did _you expect from me?"

He shrugged. "I'm not sure. Maybe hiding in a dark room all day, writing code or something. Encrypting the hell out of your email. The Directive always said that paranoia was your best quality; I thought maybe you wouldn't be able to let go of it."

X snorted. "Oh, I'm still definitely paranoid. But Sloane has me seeing a therapist and that's helpful."

"Jack's been trying to get me to have regularly scheduled meetings with one."

"It's been really good, actually. I recommend it. Just try to find someone you actually trust." X shifted on their feet. "Jess, Rhys, and I have all been sent to a couple, and there's been more than one incident of straight-up lying. I made up a person to be with the first one I went to. Don't do that."

"Noted."

X grabbed the TV remote, now clearly capable of using it, and started setting up a Wii. "Do you want to play My Sims Agents? It's a cutesy game about spies. They get a ton wrong but," they shrugged, "you know, it's fun."

Mac sat crosslegged in front of the television, looking over X's shoulder. "Sure."

"Great! So, you move like this..."

* * *

After about half an hour of playing video games and handing the remote back and forth, Mac heard the door open and someone yelled, "I'm home!"

"The kitchen's almost recovered!" Jess shouted back. "X and Mac are hanging out in the living room like they're twelve or something. What'd you get for dinner?"

Mac leaned over to X. "Who just got home?"

"Rhys. They're the oldest of us, except for Sloane and Mel. I think you'll like them."

After struggling over how to save their progress for a second, they turned off the Wii and the television. Mac hopped up to his feet, but X contorted themselves into a backbend and shuffled, still bent back. Mac followed them, just in time to see Jess yelp and hop up onto the kitchen counter. A new person, tall and well-muscled, observed from the door on the other side of the kitchen.

"Why!"

"Because I can, and it freaks you out."

"X," said Rhys is a deep rumble, "please stop."

"Like you don't want to see if I can get on the counter like this."

"I don't," Jess squeaked. "I really, _really_ don't."

"Is this what your house is like every day?" Mac asked, entertained.

Rhys groaned. "Pretty much, except when someone's... out of town." They addressed X. "I can't wait for _someone_ to be assigned overseas. Do you have any idea how peaceful everything is when you're not here?"

"I'm sure the Dewey Decimal System keeps you on your toes."

"You're terrible. You're an awful little gremlin of a spy, X, and I swear to god I'll steal your sheets tonight, so don't test me," Jess threatened, gesturing with a whisk.

Mac wasn't paying attention. He was too focused on Rhys' face, which was just like all the genderless ones he'd grown up around, but _this _one seemed familiar somehow. "Hang on," he interrupted. "I think I know you."

"Who?" X asked, unbending to an upward position and rubbing their back. "Rhys?"

"Yeah. Their face is," he pointed to X and himself, "like ours."

Rhys shrugged, seemingly uncomfortable. "We're all from the same place. Sloane has a habit of adopting people like us."

Mac wished that this Sloane could've adopted him fourteen years ago, if only because then he could've found himself in a future with siblings who understood him and everything he'd experienced. But where would he be if that had happened? Would he know Jack, Bozer? What would he have learned in this strange, new world, rather than the one he would leave behind?

"Rhys was 237," X explained quietly. "They left two years after you did, when they were 16."

"And Jess?" Mac asked.

"Oh," Jess said, sounding awkward. "I'm not like you guys. I'm not an X-operative. Technically, I'm not even human." They fiddled with their forearm, then popped a panel that whirred as it glided out of the way. Under their skin was a mass of twisted wires and blinking lights. Jess was lightyears ahead of Sparky, that was for sure.

Mac didn't know what to say.

"I left probably two years before you, since I escaped six years before X, but, by chronology, I'm the youngest."

"We call them the oldest," Rhys added, "because they've been out the longest."

The conversation stilled.

"Anyways," said Rhys brightly, "I got Thai food! Sloane's working late, but Mel should be home soon. Let's watch something."

"_Master and Commander_," Jess voted, hopping down from the counter and racing to the living room.

"No, let's watch _You've Got Mail!_" Rhys objected immediately. "Jess, wait!"

"We have a _guest,_ guys," X scolded, moving at a more sedate pace. "Let's let Mac choose."

Later, Mac would barely remember what disk was flashing scene upon scene on the television. He remembered the casual warmth of people sprawled out across the couch, chattering and snapping and yawning long unto the night and passing dishes of food around as one shared buffet, but the movie itself faded into vibrant background noise. And that was just how he liked it.

* * *

Jack had nothing to do. Phoenix was weirdly at peace for the time being, Riley and Bozer were hanging out and arguing over practical effects as opposed to CG in film, and Mac was taking a break who-knew-where that Jack had promised not to be nosy about.

He still wanted to call and ask how everything was going. Maybe it was a date and he could drag Mac into opening up about it and subtly congratulate him on moving on from Nikki along the way. Or maybe he had just gone laser tagging, which would be funny to watch and fun to join. Or he had joined an engineers club, which he really should have done ages ago. Whatever Mac was doing, Jack wanted to _know, _even though he'd promised Mac his privacy. It was hard, being in charge of a genius who didn't know when to quit.

Maybe he could check out this Kell. It wasn't that he didn't _trust_ Mac or his friends, but it was better safe than sorry.

He hadn't the faintest idea how to find anything on Kell, but maybe he'd start out by faking his way through a public records office... at nearly ten at night. _Yeah_, they'd be open.

He didn't want to go through official channels and get Kell and Mac in trouble, but he couldn't think of any way to do this on his own.

But maybe he didn't have to.

Jack nabbed his phone from the coffee table of his living room and scrolled through his contacts to Riley's. She still wasn't so fond of him, but maybe her apparent affection for Mac would win out. He hit call.

* * *

Riley tapped away at her computer, sipping at a Mexican Coke. She wasn't working on anything that was of any true consequence, but it was still important to see what she could and couldn't get into, just like testing a muscle. It was a relief to finally be behind a keyboard again, after so long locked away. Now, no matter the circumstances of her freedom, it was better than anything she'd expected.

Her phone rang.

There was an extremely limited number of people who had her number. Most likely it was her parole officer, finding some violation she hadn't known about. She picked up without thinking about it.

"Riley here."

"Hey," said a voice she didn't want to hear. "Can you check someone out for me?"

She groaned. "No."

"Hey, I'm asking for Mac."

"Then why isn't he calling me, instead of you?"

"I'm not asking _for him_, Riley, I'm asking 'cause I'm _concerned._ Thought we could put aside our differences and maybe work this one out."

She rubbed at her eyes, thinking. Sure, she _liked_ Mac, but it wasn't like they really knew each other. They'd dealt with one really freaky incident of back-from-the-dead, a bomb attached to something she really didn't want to think about, and had a beer. Maybe they'd bonded, but they hadn't spent a ton of time together.

"Riley? Still there."

"Yeah, I'm here. Who do you want me to look into?"

She heard a rushing gust of air on the other end. "Great, okay. So, I don't have a full name. I've got a nickname and maybe an idea of where they lived."

"Lived?" she asked flatly.

"Yeah. I think they're in town now. I think they live here. And they lived near Mac several years ago; they're about the same age."

"For crying out loud, Jack, do you know _anything_ about them? _When_ did they live there? _Where_ did Mac live?" She groaned again, couching the phone between her cheek and her shoulder. "Give me the _name."_

"It's uh..." There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. "Kell."

She pulled up a browser, deciding to start off easy. The first results were celebrities and a movie called _Secret of Kells._ She waited for more information; her hands stilling. "Jack, any other details? A job? An address? Please tell me you have something more than 'Kell.'"

"Kell's... a translator."

"Are you sure?"

"Mac said so. I think."

"You _think?"_

"Look, it was a one-off talk in a car! I wasn't exactly takin' notes." A huff. "Look, can you do it?"

"Of course I can do it. Don't goad me." She started typing again, at a rate almost double how fast she'd been typing before Jack called. She tuned Jack's nattering out and focused on the results for 'Kell' and 'translator,' narrowing her search down to the L.A. area. She could expand her search later when she knew what she was really looking for. Eventually, she had only one possible result: 24-year-old Yunlong Xu Keller, with two college degrees, fluency in at least four languages other than English, and no high school diploma. Their records only went as far back as far as eight years, when it seemed they'd been adopted from China by a computer engineering professor and their wife.

"Has Mac ever been to China?" she asked over the phone, interrupting Jack.

"When?" he replied, his voice suddenly on edge.

"About, uh. Let's say ten years ago."

"No way."

"Then how the hell did he ever get to know this Kell?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lawns are evil and the grass we love to encourage doesn't serve the environment at all.
> 
> We've seen so much more of X! I love them! Really happy to finally return to this; sorry for leaving it alone for so long.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


	7. Things Start to Take Shape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A name starts to become a person, Mac has a strangely normal morning, Jack and Bozer worry.

Xu Yunlong had been adopted from the Jiangxi province of China by Sloane Keller at the age of sixteen. By the time they left high school (only about four months later), they'd racked up almost 50 unserved detentions due to unexcused absences and still had an average GPA of 3.8. According to school records, they'd attended almost nothing but math (a subject which they'd been bounced from class to class in, looking for something that wouldn't bore them), science (though not always _their_ science class; Yunlong seemed to have unofficially dropped their biology class about a week into school and inserted themselves into an engineering class instead), and a French class that they attended roughly 50% of the time. They were worse than Mac.

They started at a liberal arts college in Vermont in the Spring semester that would have been their second semester at the local high school. Apparently, their disdain for high school education did not extend to college, as they quickly devoured the math and language curriculum as well as most any class they could get onto their schedule. They made a few friends and joined a few clubs, most notably rock-climbing and parkour, and written a paper about some codebreaking method that Jack didn't totally understand that people who did thought was pretty clever. Only three years after enrolling, they graduated with two bachelor's degrees: one in applied mathematics and another in linguistics.

Almost immediately, they were snapped up by a contracting firm for translators and linguistic aids. They traveled for work a lot, sometimes in areas that Jack would've preferred civilian tourists not to even set foot in, and seemed well-liked by their co-workers. Jack couldn't help but be surprised that they hadn't gone into government work. They seemed well-suited to it.

Sloane had married Melissa Johnson when Yunlong was 20 and Rhys Davis, professed to be the Keller's middle child on Facebook, had appeared maybe a little before then. The oldest child, Jessica Albinek-Keller, had been adopted nearly eight years before Yunlong had been and worked in an aeronautical engineering firm with military contracts. Rhys Davis worked in a library as head librarian.

'Yunlong Xu Keller' was not their legal name. Technically, they were still Xu Yunlong in all public records. A college yearbook listed them in an ensemble picture as 'Kell,' just as Mac had referred to them, but they seemed obscured by everyone else. The addition of a German surname was strictly confined to social media, where there were no pictures of them and barely any indication of their appearance in the way of descriptions. Their Linkedin profile had both names, one after another, indicating that both were acceptable. Their parents, who shared a joint Facebook account, shared little in the way of photos as well; most of them were pictures of a white-and-brown dog apparently named Scooter and a few were pictures of trees. They were careful not to take any pictures of their house, either.

Jack pored over the information Riley had dug up for him, trying to trace Mac's childhood through the patchy threads of Yunlong's.

He couldn't see any overlap, other than both living in L.A. now. It seemed that Yunlong had never lived in Mission City, for one, and Mac had certainly never been to China when he was 15. Maybe they'd been penpals?

But Mac had said something about Kell's voice, hadn't he? He'd said it had been so high when they were younger. There was no way Mac had been calling Jiangxi province when he was 10. They must have actually met at some point. They must have spent time outside the view of their parents, telling each other secrets. Mac knew more than he'd said about how Kell grew up; had a frightened Kell run to Mac, telling him everything that was falling apart?

Why did Mac call them Kell when he would have known them as Xu Yunlong?

* * *

Mac drove back to his house at around nine in the morning, since he and the Kellers had all spent the night in a pile after deciding to watch the entirety of the _Lord of the Rings _movies and then decided that they needed to lay out all the pillows and cushions on the floor to really enjoy it. Jess had conjured a few pints of ice cream from the freezer, which they passed around with the same willy-nilly carelessness that they shared food with and Mac had fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of _The Two Towers_.

Of course, Jess was a robot and Rhys and X, since they were both X-operatives, had gone through the same sleep elimination procedure that had failed with him. So he was pretty sure that they had managed to finish the trilogy close to one or two in the morning while he had drooled on a throw pillow.

He'd woken to the smell of sweet cooking and stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen to find X at the stovetop, swirling batter into a crepe with a stack of finished ones on a plate on the counter. Jess wasn't eating (Mac was still adjusting to the fact that they didn't need to; whoever had made them had done a damn good job, making them look so human) but Rhys was shoveling crepe after crepe in their mouth without pausing for air. A crepe hung out of X's mouth, too; they shoved it inside with the palm of their hand as soon as they put down the spatula.

"You've got quite the appetite," he commented, wishing he'd brought a change of clothes. He was all rumpled now.

"As if you're not hungry," was X's muffled reply. "Eat some crepes. There's whipped cream in the fridge and Jess cut up some fruit. Do you have anywhere to be today?"

Mac considered the question as he started filling a plate Rhys had offered him with crepes. "Maybe? I probably have to go in, just to check, but I don't think there's anything urgent for me to do."

"At your office where you do normal engineering things," X said insufferably. "Of course."

"Just like your office, where you do normal..." he floundered for the right word, "word things."

X grinned at him and ate another crepe.

A few minutes later, two new people came downstairs and groggily introduced themselves as Sloane and Mel, the parents of the three Kellers that Mac had already met.

At no point did anyone sit at a table. Jess hopped up on the counter again, filling the kitchen with chatter about their diagnostics that apparently they'd had time to run sometime after Mac had fallen asleep, while Rhys sat cross-legged on the floor and X ate at the stove, still cooking. Sloane and Mel made coffee and went to sit in the living room, only to find it still disassembled in the aftermath of the impromptu sleepover.

Then they sat on the cushion pile, apparently defeated.

They'd parted with a brief promise to meet up again soon and a reminder from Sloane that X's name, if he was going to talk to anyone about them, wasn't X. Their name was an alias Mac had never heard them use before—Xu Yunlong—and _yes_, he could get away with X by saying it was a play on their surname but _please,_ for the love of all that was holy, don't give them away.

Mac heard a little more pain in Sloane's voice than he knew what to do with, so he promised to use this _new_ name, hopped in his car, and drove away.

Just before he rounded the corner, though, he saw Jess sneer something and X—_Yunlong_—(boy was it hard to keep up with all the covers and aliases, numbers had been so much easier)—punched them hard in the shoulder.

Same old X, it would seem.

* * *

Jack showed up at Mac's house at about nine in the morning, only to find Bozer still bumbling around making waffles and no Mac.

"Morning," Bozer yawned as Jack came in, all too used to the fact that Jack never rang the doorbell. "Want some?"

He started to say "No thanks, I'm actually looking for Mac so we can talk about this whole 'we don't tell each other stuff' thing and maybe get everything back on track and also I think his story about knowing Kell has some holes, can we talk about that" before his stomach growled and he gave in, so what he really said was closer to, "N—yeah, how many will you give me?"

Bozer filled the plate to a precarious height.

"I was making some thinking that Mac would be here, 'cause boy can he eat, but I guess he stayed out instead of getting home—he went out for dinner last night with some friend—and I checked on him to try and surprise him but, well, here I am with a kitchen full of waffles, am I right?" Bozer made another professionally stacked pile of waffles for himself. "So I'm glad you dropped by! Wish you would've brought Riley along with you, though—she's never had Bozer waffles! I mean we've had a dinner but hey—my breakfast food is nothing to scoff at and that's a fact—so I've been thinking more of good food that she's missed out on and how I can _elevate_ it. I've been planning a feast! ...but don't tell anyone, it's a secret."

Jack, his mouth stuffed with sickly sweet waffles, just mumbled, "That's nice of you."

"He tell you where he went?" Bozer asked, more clearly than Jack could manage (he had more practice eating and talking without trying to separate the two). "He's been keeping mum 'bout a lot more than usual."

"Nope."

"Nada?"

"Nada."

"Damn."

Jack thought that might be the end of that; Bozer might drop the whole thing and move onto his waffle recipe or how to distinguish one bottle of syrup from another; he might decide that Mac's business was his own, just as Jack had been trying to convince himself; but instead, he sighed, set down his plate with a _clink _on the counter, and said, "It's the whole thing with Nikki. He's been so quiet since all that and I don't know how to help him out."

"It's been rough," Jack admitted, though he continued his voracious consumption of sweet Belgian bread products. "There's a therapist at work I'm trying to get him to see. So far, no dice."

It wasn't nice to admit, but there was this feeling Jack had of Mac slipping through their fingers and away. Like one day they'd all wake up and he wouldn't be around to make bombs out of toothpaste anymore, or whatever he would do next time they were in the field together. _If _there was a next time there were in the field together.

Then the door opened, and a very rumpled Mac walked through, an easy smile on his face.

"Good morning," he said.

"You're looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," replied Jack, unsure what to make of all this. Mac hadn't exactly been chipper for the last few months, especially not after Nikki had cropped up again. "Did you have a good night?" He tried to lean into a suggestive tone that would make this more of a joke than a genuine inquiry into whatever-the-hell Mac had been up to and knew he'd succeeded when Bozer gagged behind him and Mac wrinkled his nose.

"Not like _that, _Jack. But yes, it was nice."

"What'd you do?"

"Met an old friend for dinner and ended up staying over. Not much that's all that notable, other than I met the rest of their family, too, and they were wonderful."

"Meeting the parents so early?" Bozer asked, apparently missing the 'old friend' part, "Woo! You move _fast."_

Mac rolled his eyes and tossed his keys in the key basket without even looking at it. "It's _not like that. _ Yunlong's practically my sibling and that insinuation is _gross._"

So he did know Xu Yunlong's name, Jack realized. Why he had called them Kell was still a mystery, but there wasn't a flicker of hesitation around their name and the shift from one to the other was weird but not impossibly suspicious. Still, Mac's comfort didn't answer every question Jack could come up with. Luckily for him, Bozer talked right through Jack's distraction.

"'Practically your sibling'? Who is this person? I've never met 'em!"

"I knew them before I met you," Mac explained, though he'd started to look a little uncomfortable. "I lived near them and then I started living with my grandfather and had to move. I haven't talked to them in almost fifteen years."

Mac hadn't _lived _in China, surely? He must have been mistaken or Yunlong had lived in the States... illegally and without a spot of evidence on the record of their life. How had they met?

"Oh," said Mac, in response to the question Jack hadn't realized he'd mumbled aloud, "I hardly remember. We were both so little then and we had classes together, so we knew each other well. We—" He cut himself off, suddenly looking very far away.

"Yes?" prompted Bozer.

"We told each other almost everything," Mac finished, but the life had gone out of his voice. He picked at his shirt, then looked at it properly, and grimaced, mouthing something to himself. "I need to get changed. Please excuse me."

As soon as Mac was out of the room and they heard the door of this room close, Bozer said, "That was weird."

"Yeah," said Jack. "Yeah, it sure was..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'm glad to get back into this and develop the story more because I having a _ blast _ writing out Mac and Kell's background. I really must apologize for all the names, though; I'm trans and have something of an obsession with what names say about someone.
> 
> If you enjoyed this, feedback of any form (kudos, comments, or bookmarking—which I _ think _ I get notifications for) are all appreciated!


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